a letter to voting catholics

a letter to voting catholics

I don't doubt that you prayerfully considered the issues, but I cannot agree with your decision.

Many, many questions in the political sphere are prudential questions. In fact, in an ideal world, politics would revolve around issues of prudence and the
Church would never have to inject herself into politics.

For example, everyone agrees that poverty is bad and should be reduced; but there are different ideas about how to reduce it. Some solutions work better at
some times and circumstances, some work better in others. It might be that private institutions work better than government programs and that the best answer
has nothing to do with public policy. This is a question of prudence. There is no one right answer valid for all time. The important thing is that we study
the issues and do our best to vote well.

I might think that John McCain's health care plan would not have been as effective as Obama's (which I do), but that is an opinion, not a fact. When
we add that very few of us have any expertise in public policy questions, we are really taking our best guess.

But abortion and gay marriage deal with questions of things that are in themselves morally evil.

Here we have two different approaches. One side says a abortion is a right that government should protect, fund and promote all around the world and the other
says that it is murder. Pro-abortion administrations have pushed the abortion agenda internationally, trying to pressure African, Latin American and Asian
nations to legalize the murder of millions and millions of children.

When gay marriage is added to the equation, we are not even talking about being one-issue voters anymore, but are talking about supporting candidates who get
it wrong on the only two issues that deal with questions of large scale intrinsic moral evils.

Think back to slavery. Many Catholics in the United States owned slaves, some bishops even defended the practice, but race-based chattel slavery as an
institution tended to be morally evil. I say tended to be evil because there could have been instances in which slaves were treated like family members
rather than property. I'd imagine those cases were rare.

Could you imagine supporting a candidate who said that negroes (as they were called then) should continue to be treated as if they were sub-human? Would you
take someone seriously who told you that they favored a candidate who wanted to reduce the number of slaves but saw owning slaves as a constitutional right
that should be extended, even to the frontier?

Any vote involves balancing issues, and there is no perfect candidate. But when it comes to what John Paul II called "the unspeakable crime of
abortion" voting for a candidate who favors it, regardless of our personal feelings about the issue, means that we are making a decision to collaborate
with the moral evil of continued legal defense of the "right" of murdering children in the womb.

Before I was a priest, I felt passionately about abortion because of the babies. Now that I have had the experience of working with post-abortive women, I
have come to believe that our abortion laws are not only a travesty because they legally protect murder, but that they represent the greatest act of violence
against women in the history of our nation. Have you ever looked into the eyes of a woman who has had her life torn apart by what she was told was just a
procedure to make her "unpregnant"?

I have. I cannot begin to describe the depth of their suffering.

And it sends chills down my spine to think that one out of three women (that's 50 million women) in the United States will live with the horrible burden of
knowing that she was deceived into "choosing" to take the life of her own child. It sends chills down my spine because of the pain of the wounds
from which these women suffer. What's worse, many of them will never receive the help they need to gain healing. And these wounds affect their
marriages, their families and, by extension, every facet of our culture.

Abortion is a cancer in the body politic. Working to limit the number of abortions will not stop its spread, but only slow it. Unless we take aggressive
action against it, it will continue to eat away at our vital social institutions. If we fail to eliminate it now, I worry that it will become so entrenched
within a generation that there will be no turning back. If this happens, I shutter to think what will happen to our country.

In the face of this moral evil there can be no compromises, no attempts to negotiate with the enemy. Either we stand for a culture of life or we stand for a
culture of death. There is no middle ground.